Minimalist Camping: Taking Only What You Need To Survive

Minimalist Camping Done Right

Minimalist camping is surviving. It’s about testing yourself and battling nature with as little equipment as possible. Can you grab your bag and make it three days with only its contents?

Yes, you can. I’m going to show you in this article exactly what you need and how to camp with a minimum amount of stuff.

Minimalist Camping Should Be About Avoiding The Crowds

Comedians joke that camping is “spending a fortune to live like a homeless person for the weekend”. They might have a point if we’re talking about RV camping or staying in a tent city (a.k.a busy campgrounds).

In these instances, you really are spending a small fortune just to live in a remote parking lot. But, if you do camping right, you won’t be listening to your tent neighbor snore all night.

You’ll be gazing at stars that can’t be seen from the city. You’ll be hearing the elk bugle and hanging your food to keep it from out of reach of brave bears.

In short, camping should trade the noisy headaches of your day to day life for the serenity of nature. And all its challenges.

Minimalist camping ironically, takes even more planning and careful packing than car camping.

If you pack all your stuff on your back and hike out 4 miles, only to realize that you forgot your tent, you don’t just jog back to the car and grab it. Most likely, you get to work building a natural shelter!

Minimalist camping is about self-reliance. What you lack in gear, you make for up with skills.

So the first thing you need to ask yourself when you think about minimalist camping is, “What do I truly NEED?”

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What Do You Absolutely Need To Survive In The Elements?

That is the main question at hand when you begin planning a minimalist camping trip. This is not just a conversation about backpacking, but also about bugging out.

Remember that Maslow guy? Abraham Maslow was a pioneering psychologist who came up with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

If you don’t remember him from a high school psych class, here’s a quick primer.

You need the stuff below before you can get the stuff above. Without air, food, water, and shelter, you won’t worry about your feeling of safety. Because you’re worried about just surviving!

If those essentials are taken care of, then if you don’t feel safe, you can’t focus on love and belonging. If you don’t feel loved, you can’t address your self-esteem. If you have no self-esteem, you can’t achieve your full potential (self-actualization).

Ok, enough touchy-feely stuff already. Sorry, but we will NOT be addressing your self-actualization or esteem here today. However, we can help you get some inner satisfaction by knowing you’re ready for anything. Aside from that, we’ll leave your psychological health in the hands of you and your shrink.

The base of the pyramid is all the stuff that SkilledSurvival.com is all about and this article will be no different.

When we discuss SHTF scenarios and begin preparing for them, we are essentially preparing to get the base of the pyramid items in place. No matter what.

Minimalist camping is really about learning how to address your base Maslow needs out in the beauty of nature.

So if you’re debating which electronic device to take with you, then you’re not discussing minimalist camping.

If you can handle the odor of patchouli, you can get these on the cheap at your local co-op.

Skills to replenish your food supplies may not be important for your weekend of minimalist camping, but in preparation for SHTF, it is vital.

A spool of strong fishing line, a dozen hooks, and the capability to catch night crawlers adds nearly no weight to your pack. It can also provide you a limitless supply of food (in the right location).

If you plan on cooking, you’ll need a pot, too. I carry a portable stove and pot packed in with my dehydrated soup and packed out with trash. Get a portable pot that also comes with a bowl and utensil.

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Heat. An entire article on its own, but the rule of threes tells no lies. You will die of heat loss in a cold environment very quickly if unprepared.

There are five ways that your body loses heat, and you will prevent them if you’re prepared.

1 – Radiation. The heat your body produces will stay yours only if you trap it. You do this by wearing a coat or clothing appropriate for the season. Think of this selfishly. Keep your heat. You don’t leave the door open in your house so that you heat the neighborhood. So zip up your jacket.

One other item you can use to trap heat is a mylar blanket. They are cheap and very lightweight. A great piece of gear to add to your minimalist camping list.

2 – Conduction. Contact with colder items soaks up your body heat and continues to do so until your temperature and that object’s temperature are the same. If you sleep without a sleeping pad on the cold hard ground you will lose. Your heat is minuscule compared with the earth’s cool. The earth is a heat sink, and while in contact it will continue to steal all your heat all night long.

3 – Evaporation. Wet clothes will kill you in a cold environment. Don’t get wet! Bring rain gear. If you do get wet, get a fire going and get your wet clothes off before hypothermia sets in.

4 – Convection. As air moves past you, it steals heat. You prevent this by wearing a windbreaker of sorts. The right raincoat can pull double duty here and keep you dry and warm. Staying in your shelter prevents this, too.

5 – Respiration. The only way to totally prevent heat loss through respiration is to stop breathing. When you take cold air into your body, you warm it before it hits your lungs. Doing so gives off your heat to that cold air. However, wearing a neck gator will help to minimize this in cold weather.

Extra clothes. Pack for the weather you expect and worse. Gloves, a stocking hat, pants, another shirt, and an extra pair of socks at a minimum. A cap to keep the sun off your moneymaker.

Waterproof matches, a lighter, kept in a waterproof container. This is a hybrid category that serves your shelter needs as well as your food needs. You need the capability to make fire!

On our minimalist camping trip, we might make it without a stove or a fire if everything goes right. If it’s MREs and jerky for dinner, no fire or stove are needed.

If you have a good sleeping bag and a small, lightweight tent, you can be warm without a fire. A little camp stove and a can of gas may be worth it to you. It certainly simplifies cooking. But we’re discussing minimalist camping, I would argue you can accomplish the same thing with the weight of a Bick lighter and some effort.

Shelter. A tent is the best plan, with a tarp to go below it so you don’t destroy the tent. If you really want to rough it, you can find or build a shelter. Rock outcroppings or caves can protect you from the elements. If you build a fire at the mouth, you’ll be warm and dry. That’s about as primitive as you can get with opposable thumbs!

Just remember, this is your playground. If every Tom, Dick, and Larry built a shelter on your land this weekend, that land would look like a pine-scented tent city. The tent city you worked so hard to get away from.

A sleeping bag. The more you pay, the more versatile you will be. You can get a very light sleeping bag that will keep you warm well into the winter months, but it will cost you dearly. You can get by with an emergency blanket wrapped tight, but it won’t be your most comfortable night.

A sleeping pad sounds like a luxury but is actually a survival need with the added perk of providing you some comfort. It helps you avoid that warmth sucking conduction we talked about earlier.

If you don’t have a sleeping pad then you can create a simple buffer between you the earth with leaves and debris. Make a bed of leaves (more the better) and it will create a natural sleeping pad of sorts. This is not for comfort (even though it might be more comfortable than the “cold, hard ground”). It’s about keeping the earth from stealing all your precious heat.

That brings me to an important point and goes back to a previous article I wrote about sleep. If you can’t get good sleep, you are worth very little and will not enjoy your camping trip. The tent, sleeping pad, and sleeping bag will make up a lot of your pack weight. But skimming on these items will make your trip miserable and possibly even dangerous in cold weather.

Toilet paper and a small shovel. I won’t go into a lot of details here, but we’ve all probably encountered the lazy shitter. You know, the one that left his turds and TP along the side of the trail for God and everybody. Don’t be that guy.

Take the time to dig a small cat hole. And if you’re primitive enough to use a smooth rock or some foliage for TP, bravo. You’re a better man than me.

Rain gear. This goes along with shelter. If you get wet and can’t get dry, you’re on a dangerous ride toward hypothermia. A raincoat is one of those contingent items that you may never need, but to need and be without could prove miserable. Possibly even deadly.

A small medical kit. At the very least, you need something that can act as a tourniquet. No need to go crazy and buy a thirty dollar piece of equipment. A bandana and a pen will do the job if you know what you’re doing. There are a thousand uses for a bandana beyond a tourniquet.

Bandaids. Neosporin. Moleskin. Set yourself up to save your life with a tourniquet and take care of little wounds that could become nasty infections.

Hygiene. Can you stand your own stink? I can’t tolerate my own unbrushed teeth, so I always have a toothbrush and toothpaste. Maybe your B.O. is offensive to you.

Bring deodorant. I can live with a river bath, but you might want to bring some moist towelettes. Soap or hand sanitizer. Remember your cathole? Now is not the time to pick up Hepatitis C or some other fecal-borne disease.

A headlamp. Much lighter than a lantern and only lights what you need to see. Plus, it keeps both your hands-free to perform all those minimalist campsite chores.

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A pocket notebook and pen. This is one of those items I bring so that I can record some of the best moments in life. I can read it later and remind myself why I occasionally bug out from society on purpose.

It’s also a great place to write things like, “I really wish I would have brought playing cards or a book.”

Survival Playing Cards. At only about 3 oz, a deck of survival cards can keep you highly entertained without weighing you down.

Duct tape. I’m sure I’d be preaching to the choir if I started talking about how useful duct tape is for survival, so just have some handy. I have a half roll wrapped around a pen to keep it compact and ready for use.

So that is the most basic level of equipment you’ll need with a few contingency items. Of course, you’ll have to adjust it to your trip and to your environment. For instance, if you plan on doing some real backcountry fishing, bring the damn poles!

A firearm. The weight of a loaded pistol is nothing to sneeze at. My Glock 21 is 2.25 pounds of added weight on my camping trip. But where I camp you have to watch out for bears and hillbillies.

When you don’t see one, it’s probably because the other is near. This comes back to the question, “what do you NEED?”

I NEED the peace of mind that I get from being ready to address a threat. For me, happiness IS a warm survival gun.

We all have our things that we cannot do without. I once cut a great camping trip short once because I didn’t bring coffee. I thought I could make it without the sweet nectar but I was wrong. Picture Jack Black in “Tropic Thunder,” wild-eyed and desperate.

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By 11:00 AM, instead of fishing with my son, I was sitting in a roadside diner shamefaced and pouring Folgers into my veins.

Guess who carries a dozen Starbucks Via packs in his bug out bag? The point is if you need cigarettes, if you can’t sleep without a Benadryl, then make it happen. It is what it is, plan for it.

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That’s what minimalist camping is all about. Can you grab your bag and make it three days with only its contents?

Embrace the suck. Test yourself. We’re all prepping for a scenario that may not happen. But buying a bunch of equipment that sits on your bunker shelf is not where life is lived.

Go out. Test yourself. Survive for a three-day weekend with nothing but the contents of your bug out bag. Take notes. Look at your gear and see what gets dirty, what got used. What can you leave at home next time? What did you really need that was missing? Let us know what you found essential.

Disclaimer. There are way too many stories about survivalists testing themselves and being found dead. Don’t go overboard. Don’t hike the desert planning on finding water with a forked stick. Do not put an emergency blanket in your pocket and head out into the snowy Rocky Mountains.

Be smart. Be prepared. Survive your trip and always have a backup plan and an escape route just in case. Let people know when you leave and when you should be back.

There’s no shame in calling it quits if things go south.

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replace the tent or tarp with a nylon hammock. I used the clark north American model to bugout after Katrina and slept over 9 hours and woke up dry, warm, comfortable and well rested in spite of it being 45 degrees and a lite rain. in winter a large tarp and some rivercane poles made a tarp tipi for the few weeks it was bitter cold. you need to think outside the box.

I carry an ultralight one man tent 4’×7′, synthetic sleeping bag good to 10° that compresses down to about 10″×10″, 100′ of 550 cord, a stainless steel canteen with cup and lid, filter bottle, mini survival kit fits in altiods can. Medical kit, my large fixed blade knife, multi tool, headlamp , taclight, rain gear, Mylar blanket, personal hygiene kit. Clothes and food. My entire kit fits in a day pack, weighs about 15lbs and can keep me in the deep woods for 3 days comfortably. But is intended to carry me up to a week. I’ve used this same set up for nearly ten years, every where from west Texas, all the way up to Montana. And all over the american mid-west. I periodically swap out old or used items but if you buy quality things, the tend to last a long time.

The nice thing about nature is you can dig a hole, place rocks around the perimeter, with a little wood, build a fire with those waterproof matches. A fire will provide additional warmth to keep you from getting too cold.